I tried scratching marks, prisoner-like, on Akiva’s tidy old walls, but my insubstantial fingernails didn’t flake a single spot of plaster; and while I could float myself, it proved impossible to manipulate anything else into moving.
It wasn’t until several days later, which I counted as carefully as though I were measuring out ingredients for one of Akiva’s teas, that I realised that although I couldn’t manipulate anything about the cottage, I could manipulate the forest itself. I was in one of my determined fits that made me want to travel to the farthest edges of the forest and see what there was to be seen: impatient with my unresponsive body for just lying there, irritated with Akiva for just letting it lie there, and worried that Mother was spending too much time with it. I’d travelled well out of Akiva’s wardship and into the next one, only realising the difference with the changing of the seasons, since at this level the forest didn’t seem to have boundaries or wardships. It was simply The Forest.
I came across golden-haired Gwydion as I travelled. That was nothing unusual: I’d frequently seen one or another of the wardens in my peregrinations about the forest. It made it easier to tell which part of the forest I was in.
Gwydion was kneeling by a deadened tree with one hand resting lightly on the bark, and I thought he looked puzzled. I wafted up behind him curiously, following a browning trail of forest thread that made me frown, and skirted the trunk while Gwydion remained on one knee before it. It wasn’t ordinary dead: it was drained husk dead. The piece of forest around it was a little out of synch with the rest of the forest, its lines almost severed from the smooth continuity of the forest, making me blink away a sense of double vision.
“What have you done to it?” I said crossly to Gwydion.
He didn’t hear me, and I couldn’t really convince myself that he’d done this to any part of his wardship, either by mistake or deliberately. Had Cassandra? I circled the trunk once more, distaste wrinkling my insubstantial nose by habit, and then sat down and crossed my legs– also by habit, since I was hovering a foot in the air and sitting or not sitting didn’t really matter.
I ran my fingers along the longest, brownest thread, studying the tiny flecks of gold and green that were still present in it, until I came to the jagged join where it met with the rest of the forest. It looked, I thought, gazing down at it with eyes that were tight and hot despite being not quite real, as if someone had grabbed a handful of forest and tried to tear it out.
Wouldn’t I just kick them when I found out who they were!
I felt a vague tickle in the forest lines and looked around swiftly. Gwydion, his mouth tight, was feeding power into the lines– power that reached the bottleneck and could go no further. It pooled and grew dangerously.
“Stop it, you bufflehead!” I yelled, ineffectively swatting his shoulder. “It’s going to– horned hedgepigs, there it goes!”
Gwydion, shoving harder than was wise, burst the dam of power and was laid flat on his back by his own magic.
“You’ve got to fix it first!” I told him impatiently, wishing I could kick him. The solution was as plain as the nose on his face.
Gwydion sat up ruefully, shaking his head, and gazed at the dead tree trunk with his lips quirking. He seemed to be at a loss, so I heaved an insubstantial sigh and began to fix it for him. I unravelled the thread to its base fibres, delighting in the sensation of touching something, and then joined them again, rapidly rolling the thread between my palms as if it were rope. Father had shown me how to make rope once, and though I’d never been much good at it, rolling the forest thread was much easier. Magic, I decided, must be sticky.
I did the same for all the others until the piece of forest no longer looked like it was out of focus, then busily fed all of Gwydion’s pooled magic back down the threads. The tree trunk creaked and grew rapidly, spreading new limbs and new greenery, and the surrounding grass leapt into better focus. I could almost feel the forest let out a breath of relief.
“Oi!” said Gwydion in surprise. His voice was patchy, but easier to hear than Akiva’s voice. Perhaps I was getting better at deep forest. “What– who– Rose, is that you?”
“Bufflehead!” I said fiercely, my eyes hot and tight again. I couldn’t touch him or talk to him, but at least I’d fixed the forest. That was that.
I went home after that. Exploring the forest had lost its appeal for the moment, and I had had an interesting thought. I’d been looking for a way to keep track of the days for some time: as far as I could tell, I had been bodiless for nearly two weeks now, and the days were beginning to merge. Pushing Gwydion’s magic into the lifeless tree trunk had been an epiphany. As I watched it grow and live, it had occurred to me that if I couldn’t mark out the days with scratches on a wall or a tree trunk, I could do so with flowers. Nothing simpler. Just grow a flower for every day that passed.
So I sat in Akiva’s front garden and tried to make a flower grow. It was harder than I anticipated, pushing that thing up through the soil, and when it came out it looked nothing like a flower. I was trying for a sunflower: they’re big and brash and happy, not delicate and perfumed like the others. But when it sulked from the soil, it was a blackened, shrivelled head bobbing unconvincingly on a dark green stalk that looked more like soggy rope than a flower stem. I glared at it by reflex, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d got something wrong.
There was a crack of laughter, and when I looked up, Akiva was gazing at my pitiful attempt at a flower with an ironic eye.
“There’s something you’ve forgotten,” she said dryly, and went back inside.
By the time there were about thirty of the things, they were beginning to look more flower-like. They were still black and weedy, but the blob at the top had begun to unfurl what could be petals if you looked at them sideways. I didn’t know what Akiva meant by forgetting something, but I’d begun to enjoy the daily ritual of growing a flower anyway, despite her derisive snorts. It’s not that there was nothing to do in the forest: I was constantly surprised and even on occasion disgruntled by the amount of small botherations that existed at this level of forest. But that small, everyday chore gave some distinction to the days that they otherwise lacked, and helped me to feel a little more human. Wafting around in my tired little mist of a body, I had begun to feel as though I was more a part of the forest than an individual being. It wasn’t a bad feeling, exactly. It just didn’t feel like me.
Sometimes I pushed on through the forest, exploring threads and dabbling with forest magic, interfering with the wardens as they went about their business. Sometimes I sat for days on end trying to remember what it felt like to smile or frown: trying to form my dream-facsimile face into the right shapes. I visited my body less and less as the days wore on. It never changed, anyway, and it was becoming unfamiliar to me in a way that made me uneasy. By the time I had grown more than a hundred flowers I stopped looking at it altogether, hurrying past it without a second glance whenever I came to grow a flower.
I snuck over to Cassandra’s wardship, of course. In this deeper kind of forest, her house looked huge and white and blurred. That meant that it was made of some kind of stone. I wouldn’t be able to get into the house: there were no forest lines in or out of it. I was familiar with stone, because Gwydion’s house was also made of it, but his was small and cottagey and less blurry. Sometimes, hovering around it, I had the fancy that the stone was almost living, and that Gwydion had the same kind of affinity for stone that most wardens had with the forest. I spent a lot of time around Gwydion’s stone cottage: it was quiet and peaceful, and Gwydion had a habit of talking to himself that meant I could pretend he was talking to me. Maybe he was.
Cassandra’s wardship, on the other hand, left me feeling sick and cold inside, the fair façade of its surface only a thin veneer through which I could see the troubled roots of the forest, twisted out of shape in dark, silent coils. I tried to reach through the veneer to smooth them out, but even this deep in the forest Cassandra had such a strong hold on
her part of it that I couldn’t breach her defences.
I did try more than once. Horned hedgepigs, it hurt to see the forest like that!
I thought that if I could just niggle at it long enough, I might touch something, change something; in the same way that I’d finally squeezed myself into the thread by the edge of the forest. If stubbornness could accomplish the thing, I thought determinedly, I would do it. I’d forgotten how to put out my chin but I remembered the tug of it on my soul, and I felt it then.
I forget how many days I spent in Cassandra’s wardship trying to puzzle out the trick to her defences. I think there were some days that I forgot to return to the cottage and grow a flower, but I must have remembered most of them, because the sunflowers had grown in population by another hundred or so by the time I allowed myself to feel that I most likely wouldn’t succeed.
I had a splendidly ineffective rage in Akiva’s front garden on that particular afternoon; furious that I couldn’t change things in the forest, more so that I couldn’t get the sunflowers to be yellow, and beyond myself that I couldn’t throw something to ease my frustration. Horned hedgepigs, was I to be a ghost for the rest of my life?
I screamed that afternoon. I screamed and yelled and kicked my whispy legs. My ghost-voice seemed less real to my frightened ears than it had in the beginning, but I’d forgotten how to cry and in the end all I could do was float above the sunflowers, feeling somehow too stretched and thin. It wasn’t until I’d settled into a sort of quiet despair that I noticed mechanically that the ground beneath me had blossomed with tiny wildflowers and reedgrass. Unwilling to shake off my gloomy sulks but interested in spite of myself, I poked a seethrough finger into the soil, tickling the roots with their dead seed husks and tangling myriad tiny, thready forest lines. The seeds must have been lying dormant until that tiny bit of magic, exuded in frustration, pierced them and made them spring into life, seed dying and cracking to sprout with new life.
Horned hedgepigs, I was a bufflehead! No wonder my flowers didn’t look like flowers! They weren’t. Flowers grew from seeds, they weren’t something that could be produced at a whim. Irritating as it had been, Akiva’s snort was justified.
I gave a low chuckle of laughter despite myself, shaking my head at my own stupidity, and reached out to all the tiny, nebulous threads that were just beneath the soil, searching. When I found one, perfect, dying seed, I snapped it back through the thread towards myself, buzzing with new purpose and new hope. It occurred to me as the seed appeared, almond-shaped and real, that I might not be able to do this sort of thing when I was back in my body. For the first time it seemed a pity that I might have to go back one day.
This time when I pushed the forest magic into the ground, the flower that burst through seed and soil alike was vibrantly yellow and strong, spraying dirt in its desire to reach the sun. To my right, Akiva’s head poked suddenly through the window, her eyes keen and gleaming. I heard the laugh again, but this time it wasn’t dry; it was amused and approving.
“About time!” she said, and pulled her head back in.
I made a rude face at the cottage, remembering that particular expression by instinct. She might at least have said ‘well done’. Only then, I supposed, she wouldn’t have been Akiva. I had a sudden fit of the giggles, silent and not-quite-real, because an apprentice was supposed to learn things, after all: only I don’t think that’s what Mother had in mind when she apprenticed me. Learning forest magic as I ghosted through the forest, setting gryphons’ wings, breaking wolfish curses and encountering the ire of an enchantress: I’d certainly found adventure this time. And if it wasn’t all exciting, and sometimes more hard work and frustration than discovery and magic; well, that was all part of the adventure, after all.
By the time there were roughly three hundred sunflowers crowding Akiva’s front garden, I had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t possible to reach the end of the forest. There were edges, of course. So, so many edges and lands, and summer and winter and half-light: places where only the tailend of the triad could be seen, and light was dim, and all the stars were in the wrong places. It was exciting and fascinating and wrong; that the triad should give so little light day after day. I left those far-off parts of the forest largely unexplored, feeling off balance and a little scared, and went on to other parts.
I came across Bastian quite often: he ranged far and wide in his hunts, by turns wolf and human. I think he preferred to be wolf when it came to dinner. I thought feelingly that I might feel the same if I were trapped in the forest with nothing to eat but berries and roots. Even raw meat would be a relief after that.
He didn’t seem to be stopped by the boundaries of the wardships; and, much like myself, roamed the forest freely. He didn’t wander Akiva’s wardship at all, keeping to the limits that she had imposed upon him. I felt both elated and naughty whenever I was in his company, breaking Akiva’s orders without the danger of being caught. He didn’t talk to himself or to me, unlike Gwydion, but it was always interesting to hover alongside him and see what he would do.
He killed quickly and ruthlessly. He ate rabbits, fauns, odd little fluffy blobs that were fat and very bloody, and buried the remains almost automatically. I wondered if that was his human side, or if his wolf side was burying bones for later like the village dogs did. When he was human he climbed often, ran joyfully through the forest seemingly for the single purpose of feeling the wind in his hair, and swam very often indeed. His wolf counterpart didn’t seem to care for the water. Sometimes, rarely, he would be still for the whole time he was human, sprawled beneath a tree with the dappled sunlight on his face, his mouth frozen in a half-smile that was at the same time mocking and grim. That was when I noticed the faint lines by his eyes that made him look old and tired. I didn’t like for him to be sad, so one day I grew him some flowers, which he seemed to like. He didn’t name me as Gwydion had, but he did chuckle suddenly, the lines turning to laugh lines by his eyes; and after that I grew him flowers whenever I came across him.
I’d stopped counting flowers by the time I felt a curious tug at my soul. I was hovering by Gwydion’s house when it happened, watching him set the leg of a rather battered looking chook and paying close attention to his murmured instructions. There was a tug that made me say “Ow!” in surprise, and then I was being gently pulled backwards through the forest, little by little.
“Hey!” I said indignantly, feeling like a trout on a line. The gentle pulling became a heady rush, leaving Gwydion far behind, and I found myself flying through the forest backwards, a delighted chuckle catching in the back of my throat. Then I was no longer flying, but falling: falling with the air whipping past me and my stomach left far behind . . .
Chapter Six
There was no time to be afraid, for a moment after I recognised the sensation to be that of falling, I landed with a shock and a thump in lush, green grass. My heart gave one frantic thump, as if it had begun to beat for the first time. Blood surged through my body, pulsing in my ears and fizzing in my fingers and toes.
I opened my eyes to see green leafy branches swaying above me, and sucked in a huge, ragged gulp of warm forest air as my lungs kicked into sudden action. I sat up, coughing, while the rest of the forest sprang into view around me, emerald green and sweet smelling.
Horned hedgepigs, when had it become summer? And when had the air started feeling so heavy in my lungs, like treacle and honey? I could taste it.
“Rose! Rose, you’re awake!”
The girl bounding toward me was Gwendolen, but not quite Gwendolen as I knew her. I would have thought I was still dreaming but for the tickling of grass seeds on my bare feet. Besides, the arms that Gwen threw around me were real and strong, and my own arms were no longer see-through.
I wriggled impatiently under the hug, and when Gwendolen let me go, grumbling, I was able to look more closely into her strange yet familiar face. Presently, that face was pouting prettily.
“You might let me hug you for once!�
� she complained, her voice real and solid. It struck me that her face was narrower. “After all, you’ve been sick for nearly a whole year.”
I felt myself go cold, remembering all those sunflowers. Horned hedgepigs! They were all real days. “Gwen? What do you mean? What happened?”
Gwendolen’s face fell and her small pink mouth made an O in dismay. “Uh-oh. I wasn’t supposed to say.”
I disentangled myself from her arms and stood up. “I’m going to see Akiva.”
Gwendolen scrambled to her feet behind me in scattered dismay. “Rose, you’re not meant to get up yet!”
I ignored her fussing, striding on toward the cottage and past a multitude of sunflowers. Fortunately my legs seemed to remember what to do. I thought I covered ground more quickly than I remembered, and I filed away for later consideration the thought that I must have grown while I was asleep. There were more important things that needed thought right now. I hadn’t quite believed the days in ghost-forest were real days, seeped in the unreality of sleepless nights and not-quite-real body as I was. But the forest around me was in the mid stages of summer, and I remembered the dry cold of autumn wind as I went to help the gryphon.
Gwendolen, inured to having no real effect upon me, gave up her vain flutterings and instead dashed ahead of me, shouting for Mother and Akiva. The cottage door swung open, and Mother started down the steps toward her, looking collected but a little anxious. When she saw me her face lit up with relief, and I found myself yet again swept into a tight hug.
Akiva, making her way a little stiffly down the two front steps, remarked caustically: “And about time, too.” She was actually grinning, which gave her the cheerfully sinister look of one of the Fates, and I could tell she was both glad and relieved in equal measure. Whatever she might say, she had been worried about me. I grinned back at her, because it was enough to know that.
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